Live Dashboard of Farm Weather for WordPress.com

2018-07-041
Screenshot of Google Chart for three different outdoor sources. Outdoor Temp comes from the AmbientWeather station we own, the Zumbro River Temp from the USGS Water Service, and Soil Surface Temp from a probe connected to the Raspberry Pi and buried about 2 inches deep next to the east side of the house foundation.

For all three people in the world who are really interested (myself and my parents), the Catlin farm’s newly-established weather/sensor database is difficult to understand just by glancing at the 40 columns of numbers. So I made a dashboard in which to look at, in particular, the trifecta of agriculture: rain, temp, and sun for the last week.
2018-07-04-1
Just in case you needed convincing that the data is difficult to interpret en masse, here are just 15 or so of the 40 columns, here showing about half a day’s worth of data.

I had a major problem in that I would like to post the data live to this blog, but WordPress.com isn’t really setup for this sort of operation. Once I get used to the basic operations of this blog, I will migrate to hosting with regular WordPress (aka WordPress.org) which has plugins for more advanced data visualization, but in the meantime, I’m stuck with rather limited options.
However, WordPress is well integrated with various Google Apps, so the logical solution was to run everything through Google Sheets/Charts (I should also note Microsoft Excel online seems to link as well). And once I accepted (with many unanswered pleas and curses to the Google Gods) that I was only going to be able to do a fraction of what I could do with R Shiny, Tableau, or so on, all went rather well. It’s pretty straight-forward: Raspberry Pi uploads to Google Sheets, another sheet queries the 600 most recent values, which I then transfer to another workbook using IMPORTRANGE() where the graphs are made and published to the web.
Actually, I’m still fuming about the low-res nature of the live graphs (it’s even worse if I make them ‘interactive’).
You can follow the link below to see the dashboard:

Live Farm Weather


or just scroll down a bit more…

The Dashboard

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[googleapps domain=”docs” dir=”spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vQ-QnFoRqGTm5fchbTxXa7HwvwOICl0VcKOZXtFflE7qkh229JlcPUE7dQJujQ8sY9r0XZCUrTIryoa/pubchart” query=”oid=263755192&format=image” width=”600″ height=”371″ /]
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[googleapps domain=”docs” dir=”spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vQ-QnFoRqGTm5fchbTxXa7HwvwOICl0VcKOZXtFflE7qkh229JlcPUE7dQJujQ8sY9r0XZCUrTIryoa/pubchart” query=”oid=137698896&format=interactive” width=”800″ height=”182″ /]

Raspberry Pi Diagnostics

[googleapps domain=”docs” dir=”spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vQ-QnFoRqGTm5fchbTxXa7HwvwOICl0VcKOZXtFflE7qkh229JlcPUE7dQJujQ8sY9r0XZCUrTIryoa/pubchart” query=”oid=716411217&format=image” width=”350″ height=”300″ /]
[googleapps domain=”docs” dir=”spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vQ-QnFoRqGTm5fchbTxXa7HwvwOICl0VcKOZXtFflE7qkh229JlcPUE7dQJujQ8sY9r0XZCUrTIryoa/pubchart” query=”oid=546173342&format=image” width=”300″ height=”300″ /]
For more data, checkout the PWS at Weather Underground Station KMNWABAS11
Weather Underground PWS KMNWABAS11

1 thought on “Live Dashboard of Farm Weather for WordPress.com”

  1. WordPress is great for writing blogs. But when it comes to presenting data analysis results, it’s not that customizable as Github site or Medium.

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